Eat your greens!

Still a great song, 20-odd years after it was first released.

He never talked about it.

A couple of people have asked about the CSS magnifier that I wrote for the National Maritime Museum web site, so this is a test to see if I can easily embed a magnified image in a blog post.

Bruce Lawson takes time out from exploring the sultry ladyboys ancient Bhuddist temples of southeast Asia to write about the landmine problem in Cambodia. Two people a day are blown up by Cambodian mines, on average.

Unrelated to that, I spent some birthday money (thanks Matt!) on new music this week and I wanted to say that Built to Spill's ‘Goin' against your mind' is one of the best songs I’ve heard in ages. You can listen to it free on builttospill.com.

I love Sally Timms' voice on this one. Spent the afternoon copying a bunch of Mekons/Jon Langford stuff to iTunes.

We've launched an astronomy blog at work. Astronomy news posted by yours truly, among others. Hopefully it will grow into an interesting and informative read.

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Having posted previously that all the excitement in the microformats world seems to be around publishing them, it was exciting to read that getsatisfaction.com uses microformats on its registration page. Pick a service that you've previously registered for, and the magic of microformats will copy your personal details across for you. So I wandered over to try it out.

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Pixies @ Newport Folk Fest 006, originally uploaded by bwventril.

Just watched the Pixies at Newport DVD, courtesy of Amazon DVD rental. A mellow, acoustic gig from an American folk festival. It’s good, although odd to hear subdued versions of River Euphrates and I Bleed. Reminds me of listening to Greg play Gouge Away on his acoustic guitar, back when he was living in a cabin in the woods in upstate New York.

I couldn’t seem to find this in the Movable Type manual, but here’s the code that produces a Recent Comments list in the blog sidebar:

<div class="module">
<h2 class="module-header">Recent Comments</h2>
<div class="module-content">
<ul class="module-list">
<MTComments lastn="6" sort_order="descend">
<MTCommentEntry>
<li>
<a href="<MTEntryPermalink>#c<$MTCommentID
pad="1"$>"><$MTCommentAuthor$></a>
said &ldquo;<$MTCommentBody remove_html="1"
trim_to="100"$>&hellip;&rdquo;
</li>
</MTCommentEntry>
</MTComments>
</ul>
</div>
</div>

This coming weekend sees the peak of the Perseids meteor shower. Annual meteor showers occur when the Earth’s orbit around the Sun passes through the orbit of a comet. Dust and debris, which the comet has left along its path, burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere. We see the results as shooting stars in the night sky.

Peak activity for this year’s Perseid shower is predicted to reach 80-100 shooting stars per hour before dawn (in Europe) on Monday 13th August. Read more about the 2007 Perseids at the European Space Agency.